The Lonely Polygamist

by Brady Udall

  When Golden entered the chapel after replacing the axe handle where he’d found it, there was no cheering—these were not the kind of people who cheered—but there was a burbling of excitement well beyond the great good luck of having a drab church meeting interrupted by an episode involving cursing, violence, and a hot rod car. There was the collective feeling that something—and everyone would have their ideas about exactly what—had just happened. Some felt merely grateful they had been able to stand up for themselves against the forces of evil, others that a defining blow had been struck for righteousness and truth, and there were the few who would suggest that they had all witnessed a transforming moment, like Moses’ slaying of the Egyptian slave master, that would betoken the rise of a new prophet who would bring about the liberation of God’s chosen on the earth.

  This was nearly ten years earlier, which was more than enough time for everybody to get over their disappointment; Golden was not the One Mighty and Strong—any fool could see that now—and what occurred on that December day had no special value except as an anecdote to be repeated and occasionally reenacted for the amusement of children and strangers. Even so, it had been a high point in Golden’s life—he’d traded for several years on the goodwill that single episode had earned him—and everything since had felt like a bumpy downhill slide.

  Now, in the hearse next to Uncle Chick, he dug at his eyes with the pad of his thumb and did what he always did when faced with evidence of his failures: he apologized. This habit, of continually expressing regret and asking forgiveness, had been irritating his wives for years, so much so that Nola had started calling him, in a Pepe Le Pew–style French accent, Monsieur Pardonnez-moi.

  “I’m sorry,” Golden said. “For everything.”

  “Stop that,” Uncle Chick said, back to his gruff self. “You got nothing to be sorry for. Now, what are we really here to talk about?”

  “I’ve got something to tell you,” Golden said. “Something I should have told you some time ago.”

  Uncle Chick rolled down the window, spat. He said, “This a confession?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Well good. I’m glad someone in this group of ours has actually committed a sin worth mentioning. I was worried everybody’d turned perfect while I wasn’t paying attention.”

  “All right then.” Golden said. “I guess I’m real embarrassed by this, that I didn’t come to you with it in the first place—”

  Uncle Chick held up one crooked finger and shook his head. “Now. I’ve got pork roast and potatoes waiting for me at home. And Jell-O, the particular kind I like, with the whipped topping mixed in. So if you please.”

  “Sorry, I’m sorry.” Golden bit the inside of his cheek, gritted his teeth. “You know the project I’ve been working on…”

  “The old folks’ home.”

  “I’m not building an old folks’ home, Chick. That’s what I’m trying to say. I’m building something else.”

  “The cathouse.”

  After a moment of mild shock, Golden allowed himself a smile; he was surprised only by the fact that he was not in the least surprised. “How long have you known?”

  “Long enough, you dummy. I was hoping you’d fill me in on something I didn’t know about. That would’ve been something. Now how ’bout we turn this rig around. I’m hungry.”

  “You’re the only one who knows?”

  “My dad, course. Barrett. Bill knows. He’s the one found out. Half of us are in construction, Gold, my cripes, word gets around. I’ve sworn them boys to secrecy. They won’t talk about it, not if they’re smart.”

  “So you don’t think it’s a problem?”

  Uncle Chick turned, seemed to fix Golden with a hard look through the smoked lenses. “Oh, it’s a problem. Your Beverly finds out, it’s a real serious problem. For you and me both. Anybody else in the church finds out, why, it’s a problem. Your church status has been slipping lately—you’ve been missing your share of meetings, which I can tell you Nels Jensen isn’t shy about pointing out. I wish you was putting up a hospital for kindhearted old widows and orphaned kitty-cats, but I know what it’s like. I don’t like that you went off and did this thing alone—it ain’t like you, but I respect it. You’ve got a family to take care of. This church relies on you. You want me to tell you God’s with you on this one? Can’t do it, but I don’t know that it matters. No turning back now anyhow. Times are bad wherever you decide to look. We do what we have to.”

  We do what we have to. Those words should have offered him comfort, lifted his burden, but he felt nothing except the same tension that locked up his insides, ruined his ability to concentrate or feel. True: he had taken the job because he had no choice. His contractor’s business was barely paying the bills, rents were down on his units, and without a big job like the PussyCat Manor—the biggest single job he’d ever worked on—he’d be filing for bankruptcy before the year was out. Yes, he was risking his church status, his good name, maybe his everlasting soul on behalf of his family, but there was something else, something that could not be rationalized or explained away: he was doing it to escape. To get away four or five days out of every week from feuding wives and the ever-circling mob of little ones, from the jealousies and long-term resentments, from church meetings, from the dentist bills that arrived with horrifying regularity, from the darkness that fell on his heart whenever he walked through the halls of one of his homes, looking in on the children tangled in their bedsheets, thinking, Whatever happens, I am responsible. They all rely on me.

  For going on three years now, he’d had difficulty sleeping, pitching fitfully in whichever bed he’d found himself on that particular night, until there was nothing left for him to do but wander the house—a jumble of angles and corners to hurt himself on—checking and rechecking the children, staring out of windows, pervaded with a nameless dread. And when he was finally able to drift off, usually laid out on a couch or propped up in a rocking chair, it was with the knowledge that he would be up before dawn, feeling nothing of his old appetites for the bright hours of the day, for the surprises his overcrowded life had come to provide.

  Being away and alone seemed the only solution. So he’d jumped at the chance to work on location in Nevada, where he enjoyed the freedom to eat all the beef jerky and canned food he desired, to spend his off hours alone wandering the desert or confined in a travel trailer that smelled like the inside of a lunch box. He had not found the peace and perspective he’d hoped for, but more of the same strangling anxiousness, the unnerving nighttime quiet, and the knowledge he had made a mistake. This sense of desolation was not part of his life in Virgin, but part of him; he would take it with him wherever he might go.

  Had he the courage or the words, he would have explained all this to Uncle Chick. He would have told him that the only thing that gave him a moment’s peace was not the comforting touch of his faithful wives, or the sweet sight of his children come to meet him at the door, or his faith in his God. It was the thought of a woman—a dark-skinned stranger, probably a whore, with round calves and wide feet, whose image pulsed brightly and often in the foggy reaches of his mind.

  “I don’t like lying to my girls,” Golden said.

  “It’s a miserable thing.”

  “I’m thinking I should quit the project. I know several people who’d be willing to take over…”

  “Let’s don’t go that far.”

  “I’m all twisted up with it. I don’t know what to do anymore.”

  “You’ll finish that job,” the old man said, something new and hard entering his voice, “and you won’t complain about it or speak of it again. There’s hard things we have to do in this life. We bite our lip and do ’em. And we pray to God to help us along the way.”

  Golden slowed the pickup down along the shoulder, gravel pinging on the oil pan, and swung it back around toward town. “You don’t think I should go ahead and tell Beverly about the whole deal, just get it over with?”

  “
Don’t be a dummy,” Uncle Chick said. “You do that, and you’ll deserve everything you get. We don’t need to say another word about it, except this: be careful. You know what I’m talking about. Get away from your family too long, the church, you forget who you are, what’s important.”

  “I’ll be careful,” Golden said. “I always am.”

  ON SALT POND

  Despite his best intentions to commit himself to God and family, to get through this construction project without conceding another thought to Weela and her fascinating calves, the following Tuesday there he was at Salt Pond after work, innocent as a child, throwing a ball around with his dog.

  He’d brought Cooter along even though recent experience had proven it to be a bad idea. Cooter didn’t like being cooped up in the trailer or in the cab of the pickup (left outside he would quickly become lunch for an enterprising coyote), he was terrified of the loud machinery, and fast became lonely for the dozens of children who, at any one moment out of the day, vied for his attention. Bored and homesick, he would sulk for the remainder of the work week like a teenager on a family trip to the Smithsonian.

  But Golden decided Cooter was exactly what he needed: a distraction, a chaperon, a sidekick, a reminder of who he was and what his commitments were. When Weela didn’t show up that evening he went home feeling just a little virtuous, as if he’d passed some sort of test, as if he’d been saved from temptation by virtue of his good intentions alone. But the next day, he sat on his favorite boulder, sulking. The sun was going down, and the shadows of the peaks moved incrementally up the rocky slopes, filling the wide basin like water in a bathtub. A fever of disappointment had come over him; he’d been waiting an hour and a half and there’d been no sign of her.

  If only he could figure out his attraction to this woman, he decided, maybe he could liberate himself from it. But the more he thought about it, the more convinced he became that freedom itself was to blame; for the first time in his life he had been left to his own devices, free from the restrictions of church and family, free to do and think and choose as he saw fit. Ever since he was a boy all his choices had been made for him, and now that they had been given a little latitude, where had his questionable instincts led him? To a dark-skinned prostitute with a strange name who liked to wash her clothes in a pond.

  To clear his head he picked up a chunk of rhyolite, hucked it over the pond. It would be dark soon. She had not missed him in his absence, who was he kidding, she had no interest in him at all, she was just being polite to the big goofy guy who’d horned in on her private oasis in the desert. He ought to go home, he decided. He ought to go home and never come back.

  That’s when he saw the top of her head moving over the sagebrush. She wore a red handkerchief that in the last angle of light glowed like a hot coal. He waved his arms. Much too loudly he cried, “Weeeela!” and ducked his head, wincing; he sounded like a kid on a Tilt-A-Wirl.

  He clambered down and waited for her, trying not to look pleased. As usual, she did not look directly at him, but stood a few feet away—out of wariness or simple propriety, he couldn’t tell—looking out into the distances, occasionally sending a glance his way. Cooter, who had been making his rounds, peeing on as many bushes as possible, trotted up with his ball.

  “This is my dog,” Golden said. “Cooter.”

  She squatted and received Cooter with one hand under his chin and the other stroking his side. Immediately he twisted onto his back and offered his belly for rubbing, a lascivious look on his face, his eyes bulging, his tongue hanging out, his hind legs spread wide. Golden was hoping maybe Cooter would draw some words out of her, but she only murmured low nonsense noises and gave Cooter such a thorough rubbing that one of his legs pumped like a piston as he groaned in ecstasy.

  To put an end to this embarrassing display, Golden took the ball—a gray mass of wet dirt and hair that at one time may have been used for a game of tennis—from Cooter’s mouth and tossed it high in the air. The ball bounced twice before caroming off a rock into the pond. Cooter, who an hour ago had given up a game of fetch after two or three throws because he’d decided there were better things to do, now raced to retrieve the ball, kicking up dust as he went. To Golden’s surprise he leapt into the water, stretching for air like a Labrador. Cooter hated water, cried pitifully through his weekly baths, but the show-off in him had taken over; he paddled out toward the ball, woofing and kicking like he knew exactly what he was doing.

  He made it to the ball without difficulty, but could not seem to get his mouth around it. He pushed it forward with his nose, snapped at it, kicked harder, eyes bulging with effort. Weela and Golden laughed together—he knew it had been a good idea to bring Cooter along! But then the dog began to tire. He had lost interest in the ball and now seemed to be paddling in place, the tip of his tail sinking out of sight until there was nothing but eyes and a snout.

  Golden ran to the water’s edge, made a frantic attempt to pull off one of his boots, failed, and splashed out into the shallows. With a reluctant groan he launched his long body out into the water. At first he slid forward almost gracefully, like a great fish returned to its element, but then his momentum stalled, his boots filled with water, and he began to sink. He did not know how to swim, made evident by the way he slappped at the pond’s surface with his palms and choked on the water that flowed easily into his open mouth as if it were a bathtub drain. He did his best to churn his legs, all the while casting his arms about in the hopes of locating Cooter, or anything else to hold on to, but there was only water and more water, bubbling up everywhere, pushing its way up his nose and down his throat. He felt something on top of him, a tug at his collar, and instinctively twisted his body and grabbed handfuls of cloth and hair. As he did so his boots touched the bottom of the pond and he pushed up with all he had. He broke the surface almost immediately and, after coughing out a mouthful of dank pond water, was amazed to find himself standing in the soft muck of the pond’s bottom, the water just covering his shoulders, and Weela clinging to his back, one hand with a firm grip on his collar. She had tried to save him and if the pond had been deeper than five and a half feet he would have certainly dragged her down with him.

  He pulled her around to his front and they held on to each other, coughing and gasping. He wasn’t sure if he was a coward or a hero. She grasped him tightly around the neck with both arms as if to hold him up, to make sure he didn’t try to dive back in.

  “Thank you!” he shouted, his ears plugged with water. “I’m sorry! I don’t think I know how to swim!” And coughed some more.

  Cooter, who had somehow made it to the other side, pulled himself onto the gravelly shore and with a thin wheeze flopped on his side. Golden hardly noticed. He asked Weela if she was okay and she made a noise—he wasn’t sure if it was a laugh or a sob—and pressed her cheek against his. Even in the cold water, he could feel the heat of her, could feel every part of her body that touched his: her thigh clamped with a rigid strength around the top of his hips, her breasts against his chest, her cheek against his, her breath hot on his ear.

  Golden started forward, tried to walk them out of the pond, but found that his feet were firmly planted in the clayey silt, which was just as well. He was happy to stay right here, wet and cold in the insistent embrace of this strange woman. He asked her again if she was all right; he wanted a response from her, he didn’t care if it was in English or Italian or Martian, he wanted to hear words, warm and moist, come out of the lips grazing his ear.

  Cooter wheezed out a bark and they both turned to look. He was on his feet now, dripping and quivering, half covered in mud, his bloodshot eyes blinking furiously, his fur slicked down over his bony frame, whining at the ball still bobbing just out of reach.

  Weela put her face back against his, her mouth next to his ear. This small gesture of intimacy flooded him with a tingling warmth, a sense of events trembling in the balance. He could feel her lips as she opened her mouth to speak.

  She said, “T
hat is a very ugly dog.”

  11.

  ADVANCED LOVEMAKING TECHNIQUES FOR THE REST OF US

  TONIGHT TRISH PACED AT THE FRONT WINDOW IN NOTHING BUT A towel, her razor-nicked ankles smarting with every step. Even though she’d showered twice, scrubbed and soaped herself silly both times, the lingering odor of Night Passion perfume trailed her around the room. It was now nine—two hours after Golden had promised he’d be home—and the darkness outside had consumed everything but the lit windows of the houses across the street. Inside, her elaborate dinner of jerked pork and sweet potatoes sat hardening on the kitchen table. Faye had fallen asleep in the back room and the house was so quiet it hummed.

  Early this morning she had been awakened by the familiar pain deep within her abdomen that told her she was ovulating—a series of hard cramps followed by a sensation like a token dropping into a slot. As a teenager she’d gone to her mother, who not only told her what it was, but gave it a name: Mittelschmerz, a German word meaning “middle pain.” It was such a ridiculous-sounding word, Trish used to say it over and over again in the midst of her cramps—Mittelschmerz! Mittelschmerz! Mittelschmerz! (using an exaggerated German accent, of course)—as a way to distract herself from the pain.

  But there was nothing to distract her from the situation she found herself in now: showered, lotioned, and perfumed to within an inch of her life, the owner of a body as ready and willing as it would ever be—and no man in sight. She kept telling herself that she was being absurd, that she should get herself dressed, that waiting around wantonly in an undersized towel was an obvious and tired tactic if there ever was one. But she couldn’t deny the truth: she was out of fresh ideas, out of patience, nearly out of hope. She and Golden had made love only twice since Jack died, and she was beginning to believe that if it didn’t happen tonight they might never make anything together again.